The transfer and exchange of engineering information

The need to exchange information between engineering software applications has long been recognised. The mechanisms that have been developed to date have concentrated on graphical information, and have not included the equally important non-graphical content of engineering information as a whole. This work attempts to describe the essential features of the ISO 10303 standard (STEP, Standard for The Exchange of Product definition data), which addresses this need, as well as the perceived problems of the current exchange techniques